Mental Models

• mise en place
  • having things ready before they are needed
  • doing things partially that cannot be done fully
    • when there is no time to prepare ingredients during cooking, you prepare them beforehand
    • having the laces on your shoes almost tied to reduce the time
• change of state
  • of a physical property such as liquid to gas
• nesting, embedding at a smaller scale, layers
  • retractable antennae, fan to cool a fan
• emergence
  • properties or behaviors that emerge as a result of an interaction between entities that do not have or show that property individually
  • reaching a desired outcome by changing the quantity of something
• fragmentation, consolidation
  • process, anti-process
• rigidity, flexibility
• self-service
  • using the problem itself as the solution or as part of the solution
    • e.g. logs that float down the river transport themselves
    • a spatula that stays elevated when put down to not stain the surface
    • the pen cap gets posted when in use to not lose it
  • combining negatives that would cancel each other out
• abstraction, anti-abstraction
  • if there is no give on the current level, is there something on the layer below?
  • what would the current level look like as part of an even higher level abstraction?
• working with a copy
  • measuring the map instead of the real world
  • reducing some dimensionality
• frequency
  • resonance
  • pulse
  • intensity

Immersive vs. Process Time ¶

• tasks based on immersive time require actively working on them to progress while process time tasks keep progressing once started
  • washing dishes by hand vs. using a dishwasher
• the idea here is that tasks can happen in parallel with the benefit of reducing the overall time
  • start the process work early

Inversion ¶

• inverting the approach or approaching a situation from the other end
  • for example:
    • instead of adding what is beneficial, reduce what’s detrimental
    • mapping the path from the destination/deadline backwards to the current position/moment
    • to do something quickly you instead slow down to reduce mistakes and losing time on them
  • Attention should be paid as it’s possible to look at the inverse, draw out some quality, and conclude that what is desired must now be the inverse of that quality, while in fact the quality is shared by both sides.

Separating Conflicting Requirements in Time or in Space ¶

• breaking surface tension of water with air bubbles—at times air, at times water
• it is difficult to cut a thin material, therefore, you make it thicker by adding something to support it during the cut

Thought Experiments ¶

• outside the box, different box
  • when the system may have exhausted all its options and needs to be replaced by something completely different
  • the difficulty lies in letting go of the existing solution
  • how would the solution change if:
    • the size of the problem or task in question was larger or smaller
    • the solution needed to work faster, or slower
    • the cost was much higher or not an issue at all
  • restating the problem by generalizing specialized language
    • jargon would direct thinking
• ideal final result
• modeling the problem
  • eliminating everything superfluous to clarify the problem

Further Reading ¶

• TRIZ - теория решения изобретательских задач/theory of inventive problem solving
• And Suddenly the Inventor Appeared (1994) - Genrich Altshuller

Elsewhere: Outsourcing Decision Making